How Effectively Agents Write D

[Peter Alexander]

On Friday, 6 November 2026 at 19:59:45 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Friday, 6 November 2026 at 19:53:53 UTC, Peter Alexander 
> wrote:
>> On Friday, 6 November 2026 at 18:57:19 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>>> I don't understand the issue with reserving `macro` as a 
>>> keyword.
>>
>> It's just a common identifier to use. The agent didn't realise 
>> it was reserved and tried to use it. Also hit conflicts trying 
>> to use ModuleInfo and capacity (defined in `object.d`). It's a 
>> relatively small thing and easily fixed, but it is a papercut 
>> hit in 15 different sessions!
>
> Did you actually measure the cost of this? Like it burned X 
> tokens in 15 sessions because of this (and then put a dollar 
> value on that)?
>
> Because if you put something like "don't use the macro keyword" 
> in a skills file, it might burn even more tokens making sure 
> that it doesn't use it than accidentally using it and trying to 
> figure out why that's a problem.

I don't have the exact token cost, but it did add a significant 
number of turns. The output tokens were likely low, but the extra 
full session worth of even cached input tokens is not free.